Do you like to prepare meals with your family?

Here are some food safety tips for family kitchen safety and sanitation:

1. The first and most important tip for food safety for kids is to have them wash their hands. And for effective family kitchen safety and sanitation, that goes for adults, too: wash your hands.

2. Regular soap is just fine for kitchen safety and sanitation, working just as well as antibacterial soap. In fact, doctors prefer the use of regular soap because it isn’t likely as harsh and they believe the use of too many antibacterial substances may breed a whole new era of superbugs.

3. Washing hands regularly during food prep (especially between instances of handling different foods, especially meats) is a basic tenet of food handling safety. But beyond kitchen safety and sanitation, frequent hand washing during the day can prevent the spread of colds in your house. Did you know that kids with colds miss nearly 22 million days of school every year?

4. Kitchen safety and sanitation includes food preparation safety. Make sure foods are fresh and haven’t spoiled. Look at date labels, especially on cans. Botulism can be a fatal result of eating food that has gone bad. The word botulism comes from the latin for “sausage,” partially because it was often found in improperly handled meat, but also because the bacterium itself looks an awful lot like a sausage.

5. The last part of kitchen sanitation and kitchen hygiene is cleanup.The FDA recommends you sanitize countertops with a commercial sanitizer or, you can make something just as effective with one teaspoon of bleach in a quart of water.

6. And wash those hands!